🍐#105: Communicating self-hosted deployment, learnings from Posthog, and three great examples from the Stream Director of Marketing

Hey,

This is my first weekend in Warsaw in a bit. And boy, the food is still awesome. Just came back from my fav veggie brunch. This is a pear🍐 + granola dessert and other goodies. If you are in Warsaw on Sunday → Nowy Teatr is the place to be.

This week on the agenda:

• Self-hosted deployment in the docs tab from n8n

• Learnings on dev tool growth from Posthog CEO and PLGeek

• Three great examples from Nash (Director of Marketing at Stream)

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 7min

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Developer marketing insights

1. Self-hosted deployment in the docs tab from n8n

So your differentiator is being self-hosted and you want devs to see it. This is a cool trick I saw that feeds into the way devs navigate your site.  

One navbar tab, devs will click on or at least hover over the docs tab. So putting your self-hosted deployment guide in there will land.

And likely this guide sits in the docs anyway. You just extract that important piece of information and frontload it. This is exactly what n8n did on their site and I love this.

People see it first, and I am sure (many) will remember that n8n is self-hosted, which is one of their differentiators. Simple and strong.

In that vein, you can frontload other important pieces like quickstart/getting started or integrations. Especially when your docs is a toggle tab and not just a clickable link.

I'd argue that having that quickstart frontloaded in the docs tab would be a smart move from n8n, too. But anyhow, this is job well done.

See more dev tool landing page examples ->

2. Learnings on dev tool growth from Posthog CEO and PLGeek

PLG news by Ben Williams is one of my favorite PLG/growth/dev tool newsletters by one of my favorite dev tool growth advisors.

In fact, it is the only newsletter/blog where I collaborated on/guest posted (The ultimate guide to dev tool websites). And I keep sending people in there cause it is soo good.

But anyhow, Ben interviewed James Hawkins, co-founder, co-CEO of Posthog, and the result was this article:

My takeaways.

Make word-of-mouth your growth engine
Posthog focused on building something people can’t help but rave about. They asked users, and most often they heard that devs want: “all-in-one tool, low pricing, support from real devs, and a developer brand”. They doubled down on exactly those things and got more people to love them. I guess faster horses are sometimes exactly what people want.

Embrace radical transparency
Posthog kept everything out in the open—roadmap, processes, handbooks, even compensation. It’s not some marketing fluff: devs trust what they can see. That honesty draws in more skeptical engineers who stick around because there’s nothing hidden behind “hopping on a sales call”.

BTW, don’t know if you remember, but I shared this example of Posthog's funny diss of “jumping on a call” from their website.

But what I didn’t know about, but found in Ben’s article, was this gem of a tweet from their CEO ;) Soo good.

Use open source as a differentiator
As James put it: “If a developer can pick software that is also open source, it’s just better.” And from day one, Posthog let developers peek under the hood. The payoff is high trust, fewer sales convos, and an organic community that grows without the usual corporate friction. Obviously there are downsides to it → one thing is building community, quite another is building a business. But Posthog seems to be doing great on both fronts.

Build a culture of honesty and fun
Posthog’s “step on toes kindly” ethos means everyone shoots straight, no politics required. When your team runs on direct feedback and a sense of play internally, that authenticity eventually shows externally. Conway’s law: you ship your org chart (+ culture, I’d add). And users feel it. The love for this brand is just going crazy these days as it should. I wish more brands were this human and real and stopped going from cheap tricks like stuffing a 🍐 emoji everywhere ;)

3. Three great examples from Nash (Director of Marketing at Stream)

Neevash (Nash) Ramdial, who leads marketing at Stream wrote a cool piece recently:

The tips are solid, I encourage you to check them out but today I waned to share three examples from that article.

Changelog in the header from Bun: This is a cool idea to try. Sharing your changelog is a way to build trust and front-load “we speak to devs here”.

Play with the actual thing from Liveblocks: in one of their feature sections you can actually play with the result of what the product does + there is code snippets below to make it extra clear how it feels under the hood.

Sponsoring open-source repos: This is a great example of Clerk (SaaS authentication) running sponsored promo in an open-source repo. Auth.js does not have any SaaS options, just self-hosted. So if you are looking for a hosted alternative, it just feels natural and even helpful to suggest a partner.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

If you want my help, I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

See how to work with me ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 📰 Developer Relations: The Developer Journey Map

• 🎧️ David Cramer Founder of Sentry | Scaling DevTools

• 🎧️ #215: Social | LinkedIn Profile Best Practices for 2025 with Kanika Sharma, Founder of Copywriting Teardowns

• 🛠️ (Sponsored) Technical content marketing agency | Wizzard on Demand

3. Join our Slack community

2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->